Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of an investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here. Read more» 
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The mostly low-income families who are ensnared in child welfare cases have few of the rights that protect Americans as the rights that most U.S. citizens consider fundamental are hardly rights at all when it is a child protective services “caseworker” knocks on the door. Read more»
From 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare statistics available before the pandemic, DCS investigated the family lives of 1 of every 3 Black children in Maricopa County, creating a system so omnipresent among Black families that it has created a communitywide dread. Read more»
Across the Southwest, states are reconsidering how they approach welfare, with several legislatures enacting or considering new laws to ensure that more assistance is made available to low-income families struggling to afford rent, child care, groceries and diapers. Read more»
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program - touted by members of Congress as a highly effective cash assistance program for low-income parents and kids - is a program distinguished by failure and no substitute for a monthly federal stipend for families with children. Read more»
In the 25 years since President Bill Clinton took Ronald Reagan's notions to their apotheosis in his 1996 welfare reform law - which Clinton said would “end welfare as we know it” - federal welfare funding, frozen by law at 1996 levels, has been decimated. Read more»
Each year, Arizona redirects upward of $30 million of its welfare funding to the Department of Child Safety - over $8 million more than the state spends on welfare itself - who then investigate the same low-income families who could have benefited from cash assistance. Read more»
Utah has been counting millions in LDS Church welfare work every year as part of the state’s welfare budget, as a way of meeting the minimum level of effort the state is required to put into addressing poverty so it can collect on federal dollars and increasing church membership. Read more»
Women who apply for welfare often have to identify who fathered their children and when they got pregnant, among other deeply personal details, then state governments use that information to pursue child support from the dads — and pocket the money. Read more»
